Opening Verse – Story and Gameplay
Chorus: the state of harmony between all things, the intrinsic balance of the universe. You are the elite starpilot Nara, right hand of the Great Prophet, his fiercest warrior, and upholder of this balance. But after the wanton and merciless destruction of the planet Nimika Prime, your loyalties are questioned. Your faith is shaken. This Prophet’s actions are not healing rifts, but tearing open new ones. Hyper-jumping to a far-off system, you sever your connection to the Void, and your quest for redemption begins…
A word to the wise: treat Chorus like the arcade game it is. Someone took the Sabre mission from Halo: Reach and made it into an entire game. In that sense, it’s utterly brilliant. This is like a classic twin-stick shooter but in 360 degrees. You unlock movement abilities for your ship periodically as the game progresses, and each makes so much technical and mechanical sense that they’re a joy. I won’t spoil more than the first ability, the drift, which is insanely fun to master, locking your ship onto its current trajectory in a lazy arc, uncontrollable until you release the button. In fact, the entire game works best when you’re in slightly confined environments. A particularly strong dogfight occurs between two halves of an ‘asteroid anomaly’ orbiting one another, seeing you dodge between and around the humongous chunks of space rock as you engage enemy fighters, really putting your piloting skills to the test.
Opening Verse – Story and Gameplay
Chorus: the state of harmony between all things, the intrinsic balance of the universe. You are the elite starpilot Nara, right hand of the Great Prophet, his fiercest warrior, and upholder of this balance. But after the wanton and merciless destruction of the planet Nimika Prime, your loyalties are questioned. Your faith is shaken. This Prophet’s actions are not healing rifts, but tearing open new ones. Hyper-jumping to a far-off system, you sever your connection to the Void, and your quest for redemption begins…
A word to the wise: treat Chorus like the arcade game it is. Someone took the Sabre mission from Halo: Reach and made it into an entire game. In that sense, it’s utterly brilliant. This is like a classic twin-stick shooter but in 360 degrees. You unlock movement abilities for your ship periodically as the game progresses, and each makes so much technical and mechanical sense that they’re a joy. I won’t spoil more than the first ability, the drift, which is insanely fun to master, locking your ship onto its current trajectory in a lazy arc, uncontrollable until you release the button. In fact, the entire game works best when you’re in slightly confined environments. A particularly strong dogfight occurs between two halves of an ‘asteroid anomaly’ orbiting one another, seeing you dodge between and around the humongous chunks of space rock as you engage enemy fighters, really putting your piloting skills to the test.
Swirling Nebulae – Graphics and Technical
As you can see from the provided screenshots (which were very easy to make visually appealing with the game’s excellent and intuitive photo mode) the actual graphics are gorgeously rendered. The starscapes made me audibly gasp when I was being thrown around them from all angles by my ships flaring thrusters at hyperspeed. See, every time I talk about the gameplay, that spark glints again! Truly, the game’s strengths lie in its visual presentation and player-controlled maneuvering. Loading screens in areas are nonexistent, and between sectors are very well-integrated. A jump gate puts you in a Star Wars hyperdrive-style tunnel of swirly light, then you jump out of it into the next area with barely a stutter.
Luckily, the cutscenes and facial animation are few and far between, but neither look great, and both let the game’s aesthetic strengths down. As an aide, unless I missed something, the Circle is not a human faction. Yet Nara is completely identical to the Earth-descended humans we encounter and eventually side with. I think her character would have been infinitely more appealing as a unique alien, and would have lent narrative and emotional weight to her leaving her people.
As for bugs, I did encounter some very rare stuttering, causing me to slam into an asteroid or space station pylon. This was an annoyance but far from frequent. On the other hand, a single game-breaking bug caused me to lose all control input except the Xbox home button. I had to force quit the game manually and lost all progress on that mission. This was decidedly less forgivable.
A short note on the music, which never gets better than the title screen’s Main Theme, which is admittedly an excellent track. But it was incredibly disappointing that this key track was the best the game ever had to offer.
Discordance – Criticisms
My issues with Chorus, like a solar eclipse, slowly crept in barely noticed for a while before their shade was inevitably cast across the entire experience, blotting out the highlights. In short, everything besides the core gameplay is grating in some way. But at the risk of needlessly bashing the game, let’s just summarise the problems with the writing and story, because this is a large part of what led to my eventually giving up on it. We forgive Ace Combat’s cheesy, melodramatic dialogue (as I did in my review of the latest entry) so I’m willing to cut Chorus a little slack, too. Let’s start with an undeniably cool writing quirk: the Elders, pilots for the Great Prophet like Nara, all have palindromic names (Naran, Syrys, Mejem) to come full circle like their faction, the Circle’s, cyclical ideologies. Just an exquisite interweaving of writing conventions and narrative.
The first big red flag was the moment when an important side character’s husband dies and she literally says the words “Let’s move on” after a brief chat. I sat, dumbfounded, waiting for her to say more, bracing myself for the expected emotional impact, as if my brain’s built-in proximity alarms were blaring. Yet… nothing. The level carried on.
With this big misfire fresh in my mind, more and more cracks began to show until the whole thing was a like a lunar surface littered with the craters and scars of asteroid impacts. For a game about jetting around in space going pew-pew, an agonising number of tasks focus around sitting still. Sit still while talking to other ships. Sit still while hacking or transferring fuel. Sit still while listening to memories. Sit still while waiting for other ships to do things. Seriously, not even a button prompt minigame or quick time event? ‘Press the A button and wait ten seconds’ is not a fun or imaginative objective. Throughout these painful sidequests, the protagonist keeps saying things like “I’ll go there” and “I need to go there”. It doesn’t sound natural whatsoever, it’s just a weird turn of phrase. Some literally pop up in front of you, shoved in your face as you traverse long distances, and it stops feeling organic. Hey, hey, look, look at me, do this!
In fact, the dialogue is very simple and melodramatic, but then the voice acting itself is often not dramatic enough for what is being said. So many random encounters begin with a radio transmission along the lines of “Anyone help us? No? Help, maybe? Anyone?” in an almost bored tone. Even an engineer whose wife is killed nonchalantly exclaims “They killed my wife!” as if he’s telling you someone stepped on his foot. A scene where an allied space station is being attacked is full of characters calmly speaking problems at one another and I really didn’t feel peril in the slightest. Finally, and most egregiously, I’ve knocked a flat 5% off my final rating because no one in the writer’s room was against keeping the line “He somehow felt my taint” in the game. The less said about that the better.
From a genre perspective, the game has uncountable names and terms for sci-fi doodads. Drift Trace, Grief Manifestation, Raven, Faceless, Acolyte, Rift, Crow, Rite, Revision Doctrine, Spirit Totem, Spirit Passage, Enclave, Cult, Circle… and those are just the ones I can remember. It feels detached, and the names aren’t cool or original enough to be valuable additions. Also the ship’s name: Forsaken, shortened to Forsa. You’d think if you needed to shorten it, you’d have chosen a shorter name in the first place instead of this dorky pet name.
Perfect Harmony? – Final Thoughts
This game is the strangest blend between two opposing factors, an intergalactic Ourobouros eating its own tail. The first aspect is genuinely excellent core gameplay which is as fun to master as it is challenging, testing your reflexes and hand-eye coordination to the limit. I’ve played other space-faring games and nothing comes close to the raw feeling of flying around in Chorus. It’s simple, intuitive, and an utter blast. But the second thing is a cliche-ridden story of uninspired, insipid dialogue and narrative beats. It amounts to a veritable apocalypse-level asteroid smashing into the super-solid core of the gameplay, eventually crushing my enjoyment into extinction. The game’s title is the ultimate irony. Harmony? Far from it. Chorus? Try cacophony.
